When the thin loaf was crisply brown on top, the man took it
off the fire, and covered it up, on the tin, because it was to be eaten
hot.
While Victoria waited for all to be got ready, she strolled a little
away from the tents and the group of resting animals, having promised
Maieddine to avoid the tufts of alfa grass, for fear of vipers which
sometimes lurked among them. He would have liked to go with her, but the
unfailing tact of the Arab told him that she wished to be alone with her
thoughts, and he could only hope that they might be of him.
Here, it was no longer beautiful desert. They had passed the charming
region of dayas, and were entering the grim world through which, long
ago, the ever harried M'Zabites had fled to find a refuge beyond the
reach of greedy pursuers. Nevertheless the enchantment of the Sahara, in
all its phases, had taken hold of Victoria. She did not now feel that
the desert was a place where a tired soul might find oblivion, though
once she had imagined that it would be a land of forgetfulness. Arabs
say, in talking idly to Europeans, that men forget their past in the
desert, but she doubted if they really forgot, in these vast spaces
where there was so much time to think. She herself began to feel that
the illimitable skies, where flamed sunsets and sunrises whose miracles
no eye saw, might teach her mysteries she had snatched at and lost, in
dreams. The immensity of the desert sent her soul straining towards the
immensity of the Beyond; and almost, in flashes elusive as the light on
a bird's wing, she understood what eternity might mean.
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